Was it going to be purely a castaway show, where the characters settle in with no real chance of rescue like Gilligan's Island?
Or was it going to be an action-adventure show, where the characters would fight, claw, battle and innovate a way off the island to a climatic, series ending emotional rescue at sea?
Either one of those alternative endings would have been fine.
Can you build and sustain an island community with 48 plane crash survivors? Sure.
Can the viewer feel "invested" in their struggles to find food, build shelter, and protect themselves from the dangers of the island and its other tribes? Sure.
Could they have build a new home and lived out their lives on the island? Sure.
In addition, there are several key forks in the story road to consider before running blindly down them.
Was LOST going to be a survival story? The stories would be self-contained on the island, and the drama would be the day to day struggles for the basic necessities for life.
Was LOST going to be an adventure story? The stories would be broader and more full of active dangers, threats and physical altercations, something almost all the main characters had no experience with during their pre-Flight 815 lives.
Was LOST going to be a science-fiction story? Would the story of survival include elements of science fiction such as advanced technology, hidden worlds, or time travel? If this was the case, then the island was not merely an island, but a portal for unbelievable change in how the characters would perceive their world and themselves.
Any one of those story paths would have been fine.
But when the writers began to mix and match elements of those paths into a lumpy porridge of conflicting plot lines, many viewers themselves got lost amongst the growing jungle vines of intersecting and story strangulating questions.
In the alternative of what was guide's story outlines, there could have been crafted a four-person chess match over the island. Four distinct groups of people on the island would want to control it for their own safety and survival. The savages, the native people, who have a spiritual bond with the island - - - and worship its guardian spirit, the smoke monster. The Others, scientists or explorers, who build a vast, secret underground station to monitor the unique properties of the island. The 815ers, who have crash landed on a place foreign, mysterious and dangerous - - - people who actually don't want to stay but for some reason they cannot leave. And the submariners, a mysterious group of military men who also have crash landed on the island.
The series could have easily gone down the sci-fi path with the introduction of the submariners. It could be the premise of Philadelphia, where a military vessel goes through a time vortex into the past. But in LOST's case, the unrecognizable uniforms stated in the guide could mean that this sub was from the future. As a result, and following the laws of literary time travel, the crew would not want to create paradoxes or reveal the future of anyone they come into contact with . . . which would create intense friction especially if the crew knows what the Others were doing on the island.
The series could have gone further into this realm by the appearance of a mysterious parachutist. One could imagine that this parachutist was a famous person from the past - - - like Amelia Earhart. That would confirm to the castaways that the island is not what it seems - - - that there is a time vortex that threatens their very existence. In order to solve this sci-fi premise, everyone on the island would need to gather information on how to solve the problem to get back to their real time lines.
The series would then lead up to a final solution on how to get the time lines back to normal so the castaways could get rescued or leave the island.
This simple outline leaves little open ended fragments in plot points. And it was not that difficult to extrapolate from the writer's guide's notes. It would have eliminated many of the bitter fan disputes that continue to haunt the series: that the characters were alive, that they were on Earth, and that they had to work together in order to solve their most important problem, how to get home. Instead, we got seasons filled with ghosts, candidates, immortals, shape shifting monsters stealing memories and dreams, a parallel reality in the after life, and the characters being clearly all dead in the end.
In the past five or so years, I have seen many movie and television reviewers take hard lines on the entertainment they have seen . . . it is not necessarily snark, but an opinionated dissection of the show, the characters and plot. I continue to read reviewers who keep writing that the show or episode was disappointing because "it could have been better executed" based upon the prior episodes, the characters, writers or reputation of the producers. After reading the guide and looking back at the totality of LOST, I have come to the conclusion that yes, LOST could have been a better series. It could have had long lasting staying power if the episodes were self-contained stories (so it could be readily accessible in syndication). It could have had a more clear main story line focus, especially if it kept on one story path, one genre. If that was true, then the last season would have had a coherent story line to realistic conclusion instead of a deus ex machina plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problems are suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object.
It is still unclear to this day what the original meetings had in store for LOST as a series. What was the goal? Where was the story finishing line? How was the series going to end, or was it supposed to just fade away if it was cancelled abruptly by the network? You can throw as many strange plot twists, unexpected deaths, new devious characters and sci-fi elements into the show so long as they make sense in the main focal story line of the show. But LOST along the way lost its main story line focus. And that is the point between the discussion of what LOST was and what it could have been.
